Join the leading provider of applicant tracking software for a free online Bootcamp on November 18th and explore the myths, hype and opportunities of big data for recruiting.

The era of big data recruiting has arrived. Or has it? While some organizations are capturing and analyzing vast pools of recruiting data to gain insights and strategic advantages, these early adopters are few and far between. For the rest, big data recruiting is arguably still a pipe dream. That’s not to say there aren’t opportunities for employers to make data-driven hiring decisions. The challenge, of course, is where to begin.
Join recruiting industry insiders Kyle Lagunas, Talent Acquisition Analyst at Brandon Hall Group and Joel Passen, Newton Software’s Co-Founder, for a passionate discussion about the myths, hype and opportunities of big data recruiting.

As a part of Newton’s ongoing online recruiting Bootcamp series, Kyle will join Joel to debunk the biggest myths about big data recruiting and examine the difference between which opportunities are realistic and which ones are just hype. The session will also provide HR practitioners and corporate recruiting professionals with tips on how to better manage recruiting analytics and prepare for the future.

Newton Online Bootcamps
The Newton Bootcamp Program is a FREE online educational series designed to help corporate recruiters achieve maximum results with Newton’s corporate recruiting platform and to share innovative ways to improve the recruiting process in general with experts from the industry.

About Newton:
Newton is an applicant tracking system designed to organize and improve internal hiring programs for small and medium-sized employers (30-3000 employees). The company was started in 2009 by corporate recruiters with the goal of developing hiring software that improves recruiting processes by offering powerful products that are easy-to-use, easy-to-purchase and easy-to-activate. Today, Newton is used by nearly 1000 employers that enjoy great customer service, free support, an intuitive product and constant innovation. For more information visit http://www.newtonsoftware.com

Cloud Apply and ZenApp provide employers with a competitive advantage by offering their job applicants the easiest and most flexible way to apply to jobs, from any device or computer.

Newton, the leading provider of applicant tracking systems and recruiting software for small and medium-sized employers, announced today the release of their Cloud Apply and ZenApp solutions, functionality that empowers employers to provide job seekers with user-friendly careers websites. The new tools provide job applicants with the ability to apply to jobs using resumes stored in cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox. Once resumes are uploaded, Newton’s new solution will also auto-fill the online employment applications for job applicants, creating an easy and expedient user experience.

About Cloud Apply:
These days not every job seeker is using a desktop computer to apply to jobs online. Newton leverages next-generation cloud-based file services like Google Drive and Dropbox, enabling job applicants to upload their resumes to employer’s careers websites with one click from any computer or smartphone.

“It’s no secret that job seekers have long been frustrated with the accessibility of employer’s online job applications. Now with the prevalence of personal cloud storage and the undeniable rise in mobile usage, the timing for Cloud Apply and ZenApp is perfect,” said Joel Passen, Newton’s Head of Sales and Marketing. “With this release, Newton continues to solve the real problems that plague both employers and job seekers. It’s a win-win.”

About ZenApp: Job Applications that Auto-Fill
In conjunction with Cloud Apply, Newton’s product team has significantly enhanced Newton’s smart document parsing capabilities. Available to employers now, the new enhancements will automatically fill out job applications in real time when job seekers upload a resume from any mobile device or desktop.

“You see a job. You upload a resume and the employer’s careers page takes the information and fills out the job application in real-time for you. As an applicant you can do this from a phone or computer. That’s meeting job seekers where they are. That’s making a first impression,” says Passen. “You don’t need to be a sophisticated technology company to use the best recruiting solutions these days. Newton is building smart, affordable solutions for any employer that wants to improve recruiting and hiring processes.”

Earlier this year, Newton released the first completely mobile, responsive applicant tracking system for employers. And now, with the release of Cloud Apply and ZenApp, Newton becomes the most comprehensive, fully-featured mobile recruiting solution for small and medium-sized employers of its kind.

About Newton: ?Newton is an applicant tracking system designed to organize and improve internal hiring programs for small and medium-sized employers (30-3000 employees). The company was started in 2009 by corporate recruiters with the goal of developing hiring software that improves recruiting processes by offering powerful products that are easy-to-use, easy-to-purchase and easy-to-activate. Today, Newton is used by nearly 1000 employers that enjoy great customer service, free support, an intuitive product and constant innovation.

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How successful is your organization at building new teams? While there may be little shortage of qualified applicants, not everyone you see will necessarily wind up fitting in well with the other members of the group you’re assembling.

If you’re not defining and using metrics to improve the quality of your new hires, you might as well be operating out of the Dark Ages, when compared to your competitors who are more savvy about making data-driven decisions for recruitment and employee retention.

For some perspective: As a way to focus on quickly growing the user base at Internet start-up companies, the concept of “growth hacking” emerged a few years ago, according to a recent post by Nick Marsh at The Next Web.

Growth hacking, as Marsh describes it, emphasizes metrics. In the case of startups, the mission would be to reduce the cost of acquiring each new customer by using technology more aggressively in the process.

Examples of technology range from CRM software and applicant tracking applications to social networking and mobile devices able to access all required data via cloud service providers.

You can apply this philosophy of aggressively using technology and making measurements to your recruiting efforts, as well as toward seeing whether team members can bring their individual skill sets together more effectively as you build new teams.

Marsh notes that traditionally, companies would go through a lengthy recruitment process, hoping that candidates with poor interview skills but who would otherwise make a great fit could manage to get past the first round with HR. After the team has had time to meet with enough candidates, they work out whom to hire. It is only later, after work actually begins, that they can really determined if the new candidate is a good match. You should get better results when you add more metrics to the mix.

Begin Making Measurements

Build up a data set to help you figure out what is working when you hire exceptional candidates and what is not working so well. Startup firms are particularly adept at this, because they are typically used to doing A/B testing and analytics to measure products and other aspects of their business, so that they can quickly pivot their model if need be.

As you develop your measures of success and apply them to new candidates, your goal should be to continuously keep track of the measurements so you can steadily boost the quality of hires going forward. Because you will be using more data to make your hiring decisions, you should expect to see a decrease in the cost per hire for each new recruit.

If you and the other HR professionals at your organization haven’t been taking advantage of more data-driven techniques in your recruitment process, don’t you think it’s time to start giving it some more consideration? These days, with more information becoming available than ever before as well as being much easier to manipulate, analyze and share, it seems like a waste of a valuable resource if you ignore the benefits of defining measures of success and applying them to new hires.

Responsive is the newest trend for applicant tracking systems.

Today’s workforces are freer to work from anywhere they want to work. Employers expect people to be productive while on the move, which requires technology that empowers people to work from anywhere in the world, on whatever device they choose. As a result, workers are fueling the demand for mobile solutions. Employers must respond with responsive products. These platforms understand what screen size is being used to access the platform. Responsive platforms automatically provide context and will appropriately juxtapose the right data being displayed, with the right controls, on any device and on any browser, at speeds we’ve never experienced before.

If a vendor has no plans for creating a responsive version of their applicant tracking system in the next 6-12 months, this should be a huge red flag.

When it comes to selecting an applicant tracking system, however, many organizations fail to ask the right questions. Employers have traditionally treated the hiring software selection process as a feature comparison—a static selection methodology that often ignores the most critical factor for success: user engagement. Without user engagement employers cannot expect to gain agility, collaboration, and efficiency from their hiring platform. Employers must understand each vendor’s mobile strategy before selecting a product.

Download and share the free Applicant Tracking System Trend Report to learn more.

We are becoming increasingly reliant on machines to take care of so many tasks for us, with computers making suggestions for what next books we should buy online, or what movies we might want to watch next via a streaming video service. Robots assist workers putting together cars on the factory floor assembly line, and some of these cars may be eventually driving themselves rather than relying on humans for navigation and control.

It seems no industry is immune to the effects of computer automation, and this includes area of hiring and employee recruitment. A number of companies are now creating online questionnaires and even video games to help them measure attributes that they are seeking in potential job applicants, according to a recent article at Bloomberg.

With computers able to sift through massive amounts of information more quickly and efficiently than ever before, data mining is enabling companies to automate their processes when it comes to finding the right talent to fill jobs.

It may seem inevitable for us to rely more on automated systems to help us respond to the influx of job applicants. Constant access to mobile phones and the Internet has made it much easier for people to search for and apply to more jobs, which only increases the workload of human resources professionals.

Pros and Cons to the Machine Takeover

There are a number of benefits to using machines to help with the hiring process. For example, hiring managers need to use tools to help them manage the huge torrent of data unleashed by people applying for work, or they stand to miss out on finding the right candidate at the right time.

As many as 3.7 million jobs were not filled in July, the article notes, despite the fact that in excess of 11 million people were looking for work in the U.S., according to statistics from the Labor Department.

Erik Juhl, the head of talent at video advertising startup Vungle Inc. in San Francisco, will start using an online game to help track and record the actions of online players to measure how likely they will be a high performer at a new job.

Evolv is a human resources computer model that helps companies better evaluate their candidates for hourly positions with an online questionnaire.

Drawbacks to using “automated hiring” systems like this include substituting a computer algorithm for your own judgment when it comes to evaluating fresh talent. A program will not be able to determine how well a salesperson functions under high-pressure social situations, while a seasoned recruiter can make such an evaluation during the course of an in-person interview.

Another problem is that automated systems haven’t been around enough for us to be able to track how well they can do at predicting the long-term performance of applicants, the article notes.

So, while completely automated software can help you filter job applicants for the ability to cover certain tasks when recruiting to fill positions, these systems are not yet ready to completely replace such time-proven methods of evaluation as the face-to-face interview. This is especially the case for salaried positions that require some nuance, such as how well a candidate might ‘fit in’ with the rest of a team.

The future of hiring may not ever wind up being completely automated, but recruiters and hiring managers can still take advantage of some of these automated tools to assist them in their recruitment process. The best of both worlds is likely the current solution; a live human being (recruiter or hiring manager) utilizing high tech recruitment software to make their job more efficient. In this scenario, the software can best handle the data by efficiently finding, processing, organizing and checking on potential candidates, while the person can do what he/she does best – handle face-to-face interviews and provide a ‘human touch’ that could not currently be outsourced to a machine. In a sense, a recruiting ‘android’ that utilizes the best assets of human and machine is an optimal solution.

Despite high unemployment rates, many HR professionals and recruiters are still finding it difficult to attract talented candidates to fill open positions at their firms. HireRight’s 2013 Employment Screening Benchmarking report notes that 52 percent of respondents said their biggest challenge is hiring and keeping talented employees. In fact, employers may actually be discouraging excellent candidates from applying, writes Kathleen Davis in an article about the report and its detailed infographic at Entrepreneur.com.

First impressions are important not only for job seekers but for employers. As many as 75 percent of job seekers told HireRight that a job posting’s look will influence whether they bother to apply, and that they spend less than half a minute examining any given help wanted notice.

To improve the situation, your business should make sure that job postings convey your brand—some 51 percent of applicants said that job notices don’t offer accurate branding messages. What’s more, giving your candidates a strong first impression of your company paves the way to them becoming customers, even if they don’t wind up working for you. The report notes that 32 percent of respondents said they were less likely to buy products from a business that failed to respond to their applications.

Even when your job notices do properly reflect your company’s brand, it’s important to keep them fresh. After a notice has been up for about 15 weeks, candidates tend to think the job is no good.

With people living out more of their lives on the Internet, social media is playing an increasingly important role in the job recruitment process. HireRight reminds employers not to settle for using Facebook and LinkedIn, but to also use blogs, Twitter and YouTube to get out the message.

When was the last time you tested how long it takes to fill out an online application for your firm? HireRight’s report shows that 60 percent of applications made online took at least 10 minutes, while an astonishing 8 percent took an hour. Given the state of recruitment software available now, your application should require five minutes or less for applicants to fill out.

The report also underscores the importance of courtesy. You may practice excellent customer service with your clients and customers, but how are you treating your job candidates? Providing a personal touch and treating each applicant with courtesy will prompt 90 percent of them to encourage their peers to come to work at your firm.

Companies with poor hiring processes stand to lose the best job candidates to their competitors, as well as deter potential customers. Prudent business owners will want to take a close look at their practices and try implementing some of the changes suggested by HireRight’s report.